the mystery book

by uzwi

one day– you were 13– a mysterious book with no dust jacket appeared on the shelves of the local library– no blurb no author’s name no title on the spine– between covers that weren’t any color at all– you read it & have been looking out for it since in everything else you read or watch or listen for– in everything that’s invented & everything that isn’t– you’ve been trying to write it into existence again– that was the Robert Johnson moment in your life– everyone’s had one.

[…] the mystery book | the m john harrison blog https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/one day– you were 13– a mysterious book with no dust jacket appeared on the shelves of the local library– no blurb no author's name no title on the spine– between covers that weren't any color at all– you read it & have … […]

My mystery book had a cover, and a name, and everything (“When Great Bear met Little Bear” – it was a road-movie of a book). I read it when I was 6 or 7, but it shifted itself a few years later. I’ve since sought it out through online book-finding specialists, and in the children’s book shop in Hay-on-Wye, but all deny its existence.

I can’t define the book’s specific gravity, on the surface…and I doubt there was anything to it but surface…it was a couple of hundred pages of sword & sorcery maybe remarkable only for a kind of glittering clumsiness: about a “rose red city of Sorn” besieged by savages on albino spiders.The hero’s name I’ve forgotten but his accomplice was a fairly well drawn malicious ancient called “the Flea”. The plot’s forgotten but there were a few obsidian hooks that got into me and never left, unlike the title and the schlock house publisher. Parts of it lifted itself so far above the hack main that I sometimes wonder if it was one of Bulmer’s or another of the talented cash engines of the day. I’d pay a fair sum for a copy of it now.

I was 24 and it appeared not on a library shelf, but on a second-hand book dealer’s barrow in a side street on Istanbul’s Asian side. Front cover torn off, back cover so abraded with age and use that the blurb was illegible and any remaining cover art mostly resembled a blizzard at night.

I leafed it open and read “Truck, Tiny and Angina Seng”. And beyond that initial cadence, clear textual evidence of someone blowing their brains out through their typewriter like the contents of a rare egg.